Fear, Appeasement, and the Effectiveness of Deterrence
- Creators
- Gurantz, Ron
- Hirsch, Alexander V.
Abstract
Governments often fear the future intentions of their adversaries. In this article we show how this fear can make deterrent threats credible under seemingly incredible circumstances. We consider a model in which a defender seeks to deter a transgression with both intrinsic and military value. We examine how the defender's fear of the challenger's future belligerence affects his willingness to respond to the transgression with war. We derive conditions under which even a very minor transgression effectively "tests" for the challenger's future belligerence, which makes the defender's deterrent threat credible even when the transgression is objectively minor and the challenger is ex ante unlikely to be belligerent. We also show that fear can actually benefit the defender by allowing her to credibly deter. We apply the model to analyze a series of historical cases and show the robustness of our results to a variety of extensions.
Additional Information
© 2017 Southern Political Science Association. Published online May 18, 2017. We thank Robert Trager, Barry O'Neill, Tiberiu Dragu, Kristopher Ramsay, Robert Powell, Douglas Arnold, Mattias Polborn, participants of the UCLA International Relations Reading Group, Princeton Q-APS International Relations Conference, and Cowbell working group, as well as the editor and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and advice.Attached Files
Published - 691054.pdf
Supplemental Material - 150669Appendix.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 78815
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20170706-133543556
- Created
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2017-07-06Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-15Created from EPrint's last_modified field